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The Role Of Law And The Function Of The Lawyer In The Developing Countries, Wolfgang G. Friedmann

Vanderbilt Law Review

In the majority of contemporary democratic societies, the role of the lawyer is important, in some cases (such as the United States) predominant. This is so partly because a democratic constitution and legal order--for all the differences between the various types of democracy--are based on a delicate and precarious balance of functions and powers, which makes the role of the lawyer, as a trained balancer, important. But it is also connected with the fact that in the formative era of modern democracies, especially throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the predominant economic philosophy of democracy was that of laissez …